Good-Bye to All That

Hurricane Katrina did more than kill or destroy everything in its path. It changed the shape and meaning of life for those who made it out alive. Here is one of a series of first-hand reports

Coming east along the gulf on Interstate 10, you started to pick up signs around Slidell that something ungodly had passed through there. Whole stands of mature pine had been chopped down at the knees, as if by shock wave. And the huge black metal poles that hold up highway billboards, most of those were bent in half, the upper parts dangling by spiky hinges. Weirdest was the roadkill. There’s always plenty of it in Mississippi, but now, among the raccoons and the deer and the occasional armadillo, you saw dogs, more than a few, healthy-looking apart from their being dead, and with collars on—not strays, in other words, or not until a few days before. And the little black vultures they have down there were hopping up out of the brush to pick at them.

That was the outer edge of what the hurricane had done. By the time you reached the coast in Gulfport, there was a smell in the air you couldn’t tolerate for longer than forty-ve seconds or so. I’d smelled it before, but never in the First World. It was the smell of fairly large organic things that had lain dead under a burning sun for days. Dozens of semitrailers and boats—ships, really—had been picked up and hurled half a mile, just spun around and crunched. It looked against the laws of physics, to the point where you saw it in miniature, a toy box overturned by an angry child. Perfectly clean wood frames stood where some very substantial houses had been. The wind and water had simply moved through them, stripping away every brick and board and shingle. Even the toilet bowls were blasted out.

Katrina created what was almost certainly the largest storm surge ever recorded in the United States: official numbers are still forthcoming, but it was around thirty feet. A lot of the people who died in Mississippi did so because this inundation happened monstrously fast. You were listening to the wind at your windows, wondering if you should ee, then you were trying to grab at the uppermost limbs of trees as you went rushing by. One older woman told me a giant sea turtle swam through her kitchen while she perched on the counter.

In the Red Cross shelter at Harrison Central Elementary School in Gulfport, you kept hearing people say they’d “swum out the front door.“ One was Terry DeShields, a trim, muscular black guy with a neat mustache and a bad, healed burn on his left arm. The hurricane had made landfall on his thirty-fth birthday. He’d been sitting on his couch and thinking to himself, I’m not gonna run from this thing. He took a nap. He woke up and there was seven feet of water in his house. “I heard the rumbling,“ he said, “and I thought, Oh, Lord, here we go!“ He made it through the door just seconds before the surge “pushed the walls out.“

DeShields was tossed about his old neighborhood, searching for something to climb. He was carried to the rear parking lot of a Chinese restaurant. There he saw two convection ovens, one stacked atop the other, and bolted down. The upper one was still above the water line. He hoisted himself onto it and curled into a ball. The hurricane roared around him for hours. That seemed like a long time to think, so I asked him what he thought about. “Pretty simple,“ he said. “I am going to die.“

When the water fell back, he leapt down and set out, looking for food. “There wasn’t no shelters yet,“ he said. “Least I didn’t know where.“ He had on a pair of underwear and one sock. He wandered for two days in scorching heat. He slept on the ground in the woods. When I talked to him, his hands were still puffed up like mittens from the mosquito bites. Finally, a state trooper passed him and gave him a packet of crackers and a hot can of Coca-Cola and pointed him toward the shelter. “When I saw that cross,“ he said, “I knew I was saved.“

Still, the next night he snuck out and went back to a beach not far from where his house had stood. “I couldn’t help it,“ he said. “That was my beach, you know. I had to see it. Gone. All those mansions, casinos. The sidewalk, man. I sat there till four o’clock in the morning and cried.“

There was an older man, wiry and dark, who looked to be in his late fties. He had a single tooth on each side of his smile, perfectly spaced. His name was Ernel Porché, but at the shelter they called him Boots, because he’d escaped his house with a pair of dirty white oversize galoshes on and hadn’t wanted to change them since. He told me he’d been concerned about his aunt. “We’re a small family,“ he said. “I don’t know if she got out.“ When the man from the Red Cross had rst switched on the TV and put it to CNN, Boots saw a picture of his aunt’s neighborhood. It was underwater. “That was very disturbing,“ he said.

Gone. That was the word everybody used. What about your house? Did it hit your house? “Oh, that’s gone, honey. That’s all gone.“ The walls “was blowed out.“ The future had been ripped away and replaced with a massive nothing. You asked people what they were going to do, where they’d end up, how long they’d be allowed to stay at the shelter. They looked at you like they were thinking hard about something else.

It was past lights out. The generator was powering only a string of emergency lights that lined the middle hallway, where people lay sleeping on bedrolls. I was assigned a spot in a little classroom with construction-paper pictures on the wall. Plenty of folks were still up, though, whispering in clusters. You could hear babies crying. An old, long-bearded white guy with no shirt on and sagging man-breasts was coughing, a terrible hacking cough. “There’s a pill sticking sideways in my throat!“ he croaked. Another guy kept reminding the shelter manager that he was severely manic and had been off his meds for ve days now. “And you know what it’s like when you’re off your meds!“ he’d say. I heard a woman tell the manager that the Red Cross needed to “put the censorship on the TV,“ because she’d caught some children in the cafeteria watching a sex movie. “It was real dirty stuff,“ she said, “people sucking on each other’s nipples and everything.“

I got up and went out back and found a little party sitting on a patio, talking by lantern light. They were in wonderfully high spirits. Most of the people who ended up in the shelters had been living pretty close to the bottom already. Some had no reason not to assume that their new FEMA housing would be nicer than what they’d been living in for years.

There on the patio, a big jolly-looking bearded white man named Bill Melton, a shrimper with a neck tattoo, was kicking back in a wooden chair next to a black couple in their forties, R. J. and Jacqueline Sanders. I asked if they’d all known each other before the storm. Mistaking my question (or maybe taking it correctly), he said, “There’s no color here, man. R. J. and Miss Jackie, they’re my brother and sister now.“ I heard other expressions of this almost utopian feeling. An old man and woman were talking in the hallway. “All them rich people,“ he said, “I don’t care how much money you got. We all the same now. That’s why I’m always looking up to God. I don’t care how high I get.“

Bill and R. J. and Miss Jackie were part of a small group at Harrison Central who appeared to be dealing with their situation by staying constantly, almost frantically active. The Red Cross had more than enough packaged meals for everyone, but this crew had convinced the woman who managed the school lunchroom to unlock the kitchen doors so they could use the food before it went bad. Boots was a cook in a restaurant; he red up the gas burners and took the helm. They’d been serving meals to everyone, and their energy was shoring up morale. (The next morning, I tasted what Melton called S.O.S.—shit on a shingle, or meat in gravy on a roll—and found it perfectly edible.) “We feed eeeeverybody,“ R. J. said. “Not just our little family here.“ “We even feed the officers!“ Melton added.

Miss Jackie jumped up and told me I had to see the shower they’d made. Normally, the Red Cross doesn’t like to use a site for shelter unless it has shower facilities, but many of the original buildings they’d chosen had been destroyed in the storm, so they’d been forced to take over Harrison Central.

Miss Jackie and R. J. led me past a plastic curtain into the shower area. What they’d done was pretty ingenious. With the keys the lunch lady gave them, they’d opened a metal plate in the bricks that shielded an outdoor spigot. Someone rigged a gas burner to heat a water tank inside. They’d scavenged the neighborhood around the school for metal pipe and rigged up a ow. For the showerhead, they’d taken an empty can, one of these curious white cans of tap water that Anheuser-Busch evidently produces during natural disasters, and poked a bunch of holes in the bottom. Then they’d taped it onto the pipe.

“Turn it on, Miss Jackie!“ said Bill Melton. Jackie was entrusted with the keys. She opened the metal plate and turned the red knob. Warm water came spraying out of the can, a fountain of water. It made a pattern like a garden spider’s web in R. J.’s ashlight.

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